Selections of Anni Albers’ pieces from the NGA archive. Incredibly, most of these were created when Albers was in her 70’s. Really inspiring to see someone productive throughout their entire lifetime. I sincerely hope I’m as motivated at that age.

This is the work of Thomas Doyle. Truly unique and unusual in the most wonderful way! I recognized the style from a NYT Magazine cover a few years back that I always kept around just because I loved the image. Definitely a little weird, but definitely a lot awesome.

On a side note, I love cityscapes or scenes contained in glass — I think a sentiment carried over from my days spent playing SimCity 2000 where the glass-enclosed Archipelago was the ultimate goal. Despite the obvious spatial downsides of being confined to a limited space, I’ve always wanted to reside in such a dwelling.

An exhibition of large scale drawings and oil paintings at Prism Gallery, Los Angeles from December 16, 2010 – February 28, 2011. The landscape topographies were derived from graph data (displayed as printed mirrors on accompanying plinths), modeled in 3D and then oil paintings created from those 3D renders. For more information, visit the Prism website.

Stylepark has some beautiful photos (shot by Thomas Wagner) from the Mercedes collection at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. The show goes until Sep. 14 and features some incredible examples of the German auto maker’s inspiring creations.

I love the wall treatments, and the license plate in that second shot is incredible. Now compare that to this, and you start to understand why so many great designers come from Germany. It’s like those stupid faucet commercials (which I hate simply because of how the piano starts playing when she pulls a faucet out of her purse all dramatically and slams it down on the guy’s desk like it’s the most profound thing he’s ever seen when somebody starts throwing plumbing components around his office. What the hell does it even mean. Did you see how confused her husband looked? I felt the same way. She damaged the finish of that desk and I bet it wasn’t cheap considering how pretentious successful architects are.), I could seriously design a car around that license plate. I bet if you told the Mercedes designers they had to design the car for the US style plates they would just quit and throw a wrench or some molding clay or something. Also, if I moved to the states from Germany and had to do this, I would just drive the car of a cliff because the whole thing is ruined. I have a feeling the “California” font only looks like that because the state couldn’t afford to license Papyrus.

I’m not to up on the world of fine art but these paintings by Maurizio Bongiovanni really caught my eye. For a split second I thought they were manipulated photos, they look very Photoshop-ish with that stretch out effect.

The ideas for the artworks have actualized while processing time spent absorbing French Culture, exploring the City Of Lights, the vibrant colors, the exaggerated geometry, and the diverse architecture and fashion of Paris. These paintings were created entirely with spray paint, one of Matt’s favorite mediums. But the designs are very clean, and appear almost digital in their precise details and craft. An honest, analog attempt to achieve the same depth and abstract geometry of his digital “Vectorfunk” style. [Link]

Color! What more do you want? These paintings are by Matt Moore and are called Crystals and Lasers. At the bottom of that page he also has a cool collection of iPhone photos that he took of inspirational items while in Paris creating the series.

Thomas Scholes is a digital artist out of Seattle who uses Photoshop to create painterly landscapes sort of in the vein of Roger Dean and more recently, Dan McPharlin. I love his color use and the texture; it’s really incredible that this is all being done within software.

Thomas also does a lot of process videos showing how he works with various imagery and textures to get these effects. I particularly enjoyed this one which shows him modeling a landscape from a photo of a woman (see video below). I love the idea of incorporating unrelated imagery into a composition as texture or distressing — or, in this case, as a framework.

These reconfigured typewriters are by Tauba Auerbach. Olivettis looks awesome to begin with, so these souped-up specimens take it to the next level. I can’t make sense of the altered readouts of these machines, but apparently there is a system at work:

Auerbach often bases her work on these sorts of solvable codes or systems. In one of her works, a series of reconfigured typewriters, she alters the keys so that their letters and symbols no longer correspond to what appears on the paper. The typewriters are painted with clues to the logic of their new operating systems; once each code is cracked, the machine becomes functional again.Link